Statement by CEO of SPUC

Peter Smith

After 23 years of dedicated service as a lobbyist at the United Nations Peter Smith is leaving the employment of the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) at the end of this month (31^st October 2017). The Society thanks Peter for his outstanding work for unborn children and for families during this period and expresses its profound appreciation to Frances Smith, Peter’s wife, for her sacrifice in supporting the long months and long days he spent in New York promoting the sanctity of human life at the UN.

Peter Smith has provided great service in the effective and tireless lobbying he has carried out on behalf of the SPUC at the United Nations over the past 23 years. For many of the early years, he worked with a tiny handful of pro-life colleagues from morning till late at night talking to delegates about abortion in the UN corridors, with Pat Buckley, his SPUC colleague, joining him at the turn of the century. When, gradually, other groups and individuals began to join Peter, Patrick, and their pro-life colleagues, they co-operated generously with them, sharing their experience and expertise, and helping to build a remarkable international pro-life resistance, a network of contacts which continues to be an important asset to the Society and to the pro-life movement. The great achievement of SPUC’s lobbying work at the UN in New York and elsewhere over the past two decades, in collaboration with other pro-life groups and the Holy See, is that there has been no internationally negotiated agreement which recognizes a “right” to abortion. Whereas tragically, many international institutions, governments, and UN bodies insist on promoting abortion in various ways, using ambiguous agreed language to do so, it remains the case that our anti-life opponents have failed to enshrine the right to abortion in international law. Future generations can build on this achievement in which SPUC, not least through Peter Smith and Pat Buckley, has played such an important role.

Peter has also played an invaluable role for the Society in helping to develop pro-life work in Africa, Asia, South America and Australasia; and in Britain he has played a number of key roles in the work of SPUC evangelicals.

For the past three years, SPUC has taken another major step in a new direction: we have found ourselves in the central management role of a major international coalition focused on the Catholic Church, and with strong support from certain key prelates, once again seeking to defend unborn children and the family.

The Society will continue to be grateful for Peter's irreplaceable contribution to the development of our international work, as we now take that work forward in new directions.

John Smeaton

Chief Executive

Society for the Protection of Unborn Children